Can an English Teacher Learn to Code?

The Mayor announced his computer-science-education plan at Bronx Latin School in September.

Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty

In September, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a ten-year deadline to offer computer science to every New York City public-school student at every grade level. One of the major obstacles to achieving “Computer Science for All,” as the undertaking is called, is the fact that most teachers in the school system don’t have computer-science backgrounds. “We’re not training every teacher,” Michael Preston, who runs the city’s Foundation for Computer Science Education, told me a few weeks later. The plan sets aside eighty million dollars; in addition to public money, the city is raising private funds for some five thousand teachers to go through computer-science programs. “Kids make decisions about who they’re going to be in the future by middle school,” Preston said. “We’re going to make sure they get the foundations.”

Meredith Towne, a theatre and English teacher, is thirty-eight. “I’m an arts person. I’m a humanities person,” Towne says. “I was never encouraged to pursue engineering.” She likes Joan Didion and George Orwell, and according to her blog, “Towne Hall,” she is a creature of habit. But recently she started teaching at the Academy for Software Engineering, a new high school on Irving Place, in lower Manhattan, and she heard that a few colleagues with the know-how had started a series of computer-science pedagogy meet-ups. The latest, held on a recent Saturday at the Manhattan headquarters of Teach for America, promised a session on “Engaging all learners.” (“Will there be food like last time?” someone asked in the online forum. Yes.)

Sean Stern, a brown-bearded former Amazon engineer who left the programming world to become a teacher, made the arrangements. “Some teachers are very nervous—‘I’m bad at tech; tech is scary,’ ” he said. “I went to a public school in Pennsylvania—there was nothing.” He first encountered coding as a teen-ager, at summer camp, where he had to make a computer play Go Fish. “There was a tournament. I wrote in Java. Mine was simple—it remembered what card it asked for last and asked for that one back. It did O.K., actually. It was one of those programs that, if you make it too complicated, you screw yourself over.”

Meredith Towne arrived, and greeted Stern by the coffee. “It’s intimidating, especially if you don’t have the background—if you can’t talk the talk,” she said. Towne has curly hair, which she pulled back into a ponytail, and wore brown glasses and gray running sneakers. Last year, she undertook a six-hour boot camp run by Stern in order to learn Scratch, a tool for kids to practice the basics of programming. She survived. “The language in Scratch is very similar to theatre language,” she said. “They call it blocking. There are a lot of parallels.” She devised an assignment in which students use Scratch to direct staging—that is, program their fellow-actors. “So they have to perform with the blocking, and it has to match.” Her ninth graders have been tinkering with Scratch for a couple of months now. “They’re already better at it than me,” she said. She found a seat at a table and selected a pink marker from a pile. “It’s exposure,” she added. “Even if it’s not something that grabs them—it’s like why we read classic literature. It’s cultural collateral.”

Class started. One of the instructors, Alana Aaron, who teaches fifth grade in Washington Heights, stood before a few dozen teachers. “We won’t teach you like elementary-school kids,” she said. Towne opened her laptop. “Can someone tell me what an algorithm is?”

Hands went up. With an encouraging wave, Aaron called on a guy in a navy sweatshirt. “I like to say it’s like a recipe,” he said.

The instructor nodded. “An algorithm is just a list of steps to complete a task,” she said. “Now I’m going to give you all an algorithm, and you are going to be my computer.” She pointed to a stack of handouts with grids printed on them. “Make an image that looks like mine.”

Everyone grabbed a sheet and settled down to work quietly. Aaron called out instructions: “Over one.” “Down one.” “Fill in.”

“I’m going to kill at this,” someone said. Towne kept her eyes on her own paper.

Aaron held up her graph high. “This is the image you should have created.” The teachers flashed thumbs-ups. “Yes!”

Next lesson: progress on the grid game, with a relay-race component. Aaron showed a completed grid; this time, the test would be writing out the steps with arrows and a scribbled “fill-in” symbol—code, with markers. “You’ll form teams, and each team member will only be able to write one symbol of the program,” Aaron explained. “Then you come back, tag your teammate, the next teammate goes and writes the next symbol of the program. But you’re also checking for bugs!”

She walked over to a table set with clipboards. “Let’s stand up and meet me over here,” she said. “We’re going to form four teams of four.” The teachers jostled to get in position. Aaron, inspecting the rows, noticed someone fidgeting, and turned to the group on the far right: “You guys look like you’re getting a bit of a head start.” They shuffled back.

Towne stood patiently, having wafted in at the back of the line. There would be two rounds.

“On your mark, get set, go!”

“We can do this.”

“You can do it!”

“Hey, take it easy partner. It’s just a game.”

“I don’t know what these mean!”

“We’re still going?”

“Don’t tell, that’s cheating!”

“Tell us, too!”

“We need another worksheet.”

“The last box!”

“We did it!”

“They got it.”

“You guys rock.”

“Dude, I’m confused.”

Stickers went to the winners. Everyone else, including the members of Towne’s team, got mints. One of her teammates shook his head. “We put a scribble there instead of a third arrow,” he said. A simple syntax error, of sorts.